In the review below of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, Corrington characterizes Bukowski as a "surface" poet who "is capable of producing a poetry of pure emotion in which idea, information, the narrative or anecdote, is held to a minimum. "

The recent publication of Charles Bukowski's selected poems [It Catches My Heart in Its Hands] marks a kind of watershed in the career of one of the West Coast's most striking poets….

As those who know his poetry will testify, Bukowski's poems go well enough one by one. But there is no substitute for reading a man's work in bulk….

Faced with several score of Bukowski's best poems, the illusion of ignorance or perverse and directionless crudity dissolves like a tar-doll in August sun. Individual poems merge to form together a body...